I realized now that Lawrence’s route must have followed the shoulder of the wadi, but here the going was no easier. There was no clearly marked path, and often I stumbled over boulders, fell sprawling, cut my feet. I shimmied, half skating, down loose screes, balanced on ledges no more than eighteen inches wide, worked my way down into a weird broken water-course of purple stones and white felspar. Once I came so near to the edge of the precipice that Shaylan, bucking and shying, almost pulled me over. Again, I wondered that Lawrence’s army could have come this way. True, he had reported that, on one of his ascents, two of the camels had been lost when they had slipped and fallen down the hillside, but on the other hand he had also described how, on another occasion, he had ridden down the pass without descending from his camel except in one or two difficult places. I shuddered at the thought of riding a camel over these sharp boulders and precipitous paths today. Yet it clearly was the same ‘zig-zag broken pass’, for gazing back down hundreds of feet, I could see the grassy street of Hafira terminating in a cone-hill which appeared to stand in the centre of the wadi, with the diaphanous mass of Rum brooding over it, exactly as Lawrence had described. Getting up that hill with a camel in tow was one of the most exhausting experiences I have ever had, and by the time I reached the top it was almost sunset. The ascent had taken me six hours. I could not believe that Lawrence had ever managed to ride up or down the steep, stony hillside virtually without getting out of the saddle – but perhaps, I thought, despite my years of experience, he had simply been a better camel-man than me.
Lawrence thought of Hafira as a passageway between Arabia and Syria, between heat and cold, between tamarisk and wormwood. Indeed, the plateau was a very different world from the sandy swaths of Rum – a stony yellow moorland undulating almost featurelessly into the distance. In a cleft beyond the first undulation, I came upon a batch of Bedu tents. Dogs barked at me as I walked by, and a Bedui in a pitch-black dishdashacame out and invited me to stay the night. He showed me where to couch my camel, and five or six Bedu in ragged shirts helped me unload. They welcomed me into the tent where a fire of rimthwas flickering in the square hearth and made a place for me. After dark they slaughtered a sheep, and we squatted by the fire, drinking tea and coffee, talking for hours, until the meat was carried in on a tin tray a yard in diameter – haunches and ribs of mutton, with the sheep’s head set on top as centrepiece with its gaping maw frozen in a diabolic grin. This reminded me of the great food-tray Lawrence had described as a shallow bath, five feet across and set on a single foot, which had belonged to Auda Abu Tayyi. My Bedu hosts were Howaytat, and I asked after Auda’s great tray. They told me that when the Jordanian army had occupied Jefer in the 1930s, they had looted much of Auda’s property. Perhaps the tray had gone with them. My host, Mohammad ibn Salem, who had once served in the Desert Police camel-corps, told me that he remembered seeing an engraved tray at Jefer as a boy, ‘but it wasn’t five feet across,’ he said, ‘it was just the usual size.’ I wondered if this was another of Lawrence’s elaborations. In his original diary entry, he had written that the vessel was ‘3 feet wide’, then crossed it out and written ‘5 feet wide’. Later, I read a report by Alois Musil, who had dined with Auda in 1910, and who described the dish – presumably the same one – as being of the standard size – about three feet across. If Lawrence had exaggerated about such a trivial thing, what of the Hafira pass, I wondered? I asked the Howaytat their opinion. The older men laughed, and Mohammad told me: ‘In Lawrence’s time Hafira was different. There were no roads and no cars then, and the pass was on the main caravan route from the Hejaz to Ma’an: it was used by hundreds of camels every day. The local Howaytat used to keep it in good trim – clearing away the stones that were washed down by the rains. But now, everyone has motor cars. There are roads which take you around to Naqab ash-Shtar. Only shepherds use the path now, and nobody bothers to clear it up. That’s why you found it difficult. In the old times it was just like a motorway – you could easily ride up and down!’
I went to sleep in the tent that night, satisfied that these Howaytat had vindicated both Lawrence and myself.
My hosts were from the Dumaniyya section of the Howaytat – the people of Sheikh Gasim Abu Dumayk, who before the Mudowwara raid had raged that he would join the Turks. He had not carried out the threat, and when Lawrence had returned to Rum he placated Gasim by recruiting only the Dumaniyya for his next railway raid at Kilometre 589 south of Ma an. It was during the march-in to this strike, on 1 October 1917, that he had climbed the Hafira pass for the first time. The raid lasted six days, and at last, after several days of waiting, Lawrence had mined and destroyed a train at Imshash al-Hesma, and claimed to have been injured in the hip when a Turkish officer had fired at him. In the following months his trained dynamiters destroyed seventeen locomotives and seriously hampered the working of the railway, precisely as he had planned. In mid-October, though, he was flown back to Ismaeliyya to meet Allenby for the second time.
Allenby was planning his major offensive against the Gaza-Beersheba line for November. In July, Lawrence had promised him a general revolt in Syria to secure the entire British flank, but now, three months later, he was loath to take such an irreversible step: the detailed report made to Clayton after the taking of Aqaba was, he said, ‘ancient history’. It had achieved its immediate object – massive British support for the Arab Revolt – but now Lawrence realized he could not deliver, for if Allenby’s offensive failed, or failed to reach Jaffa and Jerusalem, the rebel Arabs would be cut off and massacred by the Turks. The Arabs of Syria were not nomads but cultivating peasants, who lived in populous villages and would not be able to fade back into the desert like Lawrence’s cameleers – they were a one-time weapon, and if fired off prematurely would be entirely wasted. To Allenby, perhaps, the Arabs were expendable, but not to Lawrence, whose passionate desire was that the Revolt should succeed. Instead, he decided to put his efforts into a proposal which had originally been but a small part of his master-plan – an attack on the westernmost bridge in the Yarmuk valley, at Jisr al-Hemmi – a complex steel structure spanning a plunging ravine, protected by only half a dozen sentries. The destruction of this bridge would, he calculated, stop railway traffic for two weeks. If the Arabs could blow the Jisr at precisely the moment when Allenby was driving the Turks before him, then their main line of retreat from Jerusalem to Damascus would be entirely cut off. They would be forced to withdraw on foot, and this would, perhaps, be the correct moment for the Syrian peasantry to rise and harass their retreat. Allenby approved the plan and asked Lawrence to cut the railway on 5 November, or one of the three succeeding days.
Lawrence planned to approach Yarmuk by the same gradual turning movement he had used to such great success at Aqaba. As on that operation, he would march in with fifty men, hopefully from Auda’s Howaytat – the only Bedu he thought aggressive enough to capture the bridge in frontal attack. The route would hug the desert, from Rum to Azraq – the oasis in the Syrian desert where he had met Nuri ash-Sha’alan – and from there, having recruited a ladder of local Bedu tribes, the Bani Sakhr, the Bani Hassan, the Serahiyyin and the Sirhan, he would push quickly into the sown land of Syria and strike at the bridge. It was to be as close a facsimile of the Aqaba operation as conditions would allow, though this time the Bedu would be strengthened by a squadron of Indian machine-gunners, under their Jemadar Hassan Shah, who were already hardened to camel-riding, having spent some months mining the railway in the Hejaz. Lawrence would be accompanied by Lieutenant Wood of the Royal Engineers, who would lay the mine if he was hit, and part of the way by George Lloyd, the former Welsh banker to whose conversation Lawrence had become addicted. In place of the charismatic Nasir, who was away on another job, OC Mission was to be Sharif ‘Ali ibn Hussain al-Harithi, the brave, handsome ‘young lord’.